Thought for the day, 4 October 2023

I’ve been musing.

Everyone knows (hopefully) that the right to vote was hard won: wrested from the grabby hands of older white blokes with property.  That's stuff we learned at school, yeah?  Civil rights, workers rising, protesters dying, yada yada yada.  And, of course, Aotearoa was first out of the gate on that ‘ladies voting’ thing. 

It’s all interesting, but in a history lesson kind of way.  These days, it's hard to get fire in your belly about voting: a cause that's both so basic, and so clearly achieved. The good guys won. Let’s move on.

Here’s what I reckon. The vote isn't just about quantity (yes, you’ve got one), but quality.

Like many people, I’ve been watching this election with a growing unease. That unease goes two ways.

Here’s the first. Right now, it’s easy to be suspicious of candidates - in it for ego, for careerism, for the chance to feather their own nests. Yes, that’s probably true of some, or maybe even more than some. But if you want democracy, you need candidates. To abuse candidates, to throw things at them and chase them, to shake and slap them, to invade and vandalise their homes, is an abject failure - a failure of civility as well as civics. And while that failure seems to extend to parties across the board, it’s not randomly distributed. Let’s just say, I reckon only one party’s getting the N word spraypainted on its billboards.

My second unease is even greater.

In the time since the vote was won, conventions around democracy have grown and matured. Nowadays we expect, or we should, that our leaders will set out their policies in full. They’ll explain who’ll benefit, who’ll pay. They’ll take time to engage, to respond to any questions from the electorate. They’ll offer detail and thoughtfulness, not one-liners for the camera, to help the public be informed. Their answers will be, you know, true.

I could offer you so many examples that grind my gears. The latest, just yesterday, was that one party - they’ll remain unnamed - said they’ll only release the costings for their policies after the election. It’s like those conventions around democracy, that matter just as much as the vote itself, are being forgotten - and the ones meant to safeguard those conventions are kind of taking the piss.

But if the piss is being taken, well, that’s kind of on us. We need to stop letting it.

We don’t really remember our ancestors, the ones who fought for the vote, who died for it. And that’s kind of a shame. Because they had us - the ones who would follow - in mind, every step of the way. It was for us. For us, with our reposted conspiracy theories, our shitty memes and squabbles and rhetoric. Us. And some things you have to pay back as well as forward.

This election tells me the fight for the vote hasn’t yet been fully won. And if you’re feeling disenfranchised right now, well, maybe that’s because you are.

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